What place does interculturality have in the translation context: should it appear as a universalized identity orientation? Or rather as the opposite, highlighting the difference between cultures? Cultural difference and communication suggest that translation is only a second-hand replacement of some authentic source (Juliane House)—is this how we should think about it? Yet highlighting cultural difference comes up sharply against the postmodernist idea that cultures are just an illusion. That could jolt us out of the ways we tend to think of translation: intercultural and functionalist approaches have usually given priority to the receiving culture and its needs, as against the source culture. But should we really be using such outmoded binary concepts inherited from structuralism? Can we, instead, think of translation as forming a Third Space beyond the participating cultural formations?
Michael Steppat
Michael STEPPAT is Professor of Literature in English at the University of Bayreuth (Germany), and an international faculty member at SISU in Shanghai (School of English Studies). He has published several books on Interculturality and Literature, as well as volumes on American studies (Discourses of Exception, Exclusion, Exchange) and on Cross-cultural Representations of Honor Cultures and Face Cultures. Michael Steppat was formerly a Professor at Arizona State University and the University of Texas (Austin), and he is a research fellow at the John Kluge Center of the Library of Congress (Washington DC).
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